A Scream of Hope

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That thought ran through my head after I had screamed for a full minute. What else could I do? I was floating in space with no way to contact the spaceship from which I had become detached.

The irony. I went out onto the hull to fix the radio antenna and failed at that. I was making progress until a cable arced and burned through my tether. The ship was not even visible anymore. I was alone in the universe. I screamed again. I didn’t care if I exhausted my oxygen. I did not want to prolong my terror.

I checked my gauges. About an hour of oxygen, less than that for heat. Freezing to death seemed preferable to gasping for breath. Survival was not an option. Maybe turn off the heat and just freeze with a lungful of oxygen. I was ready to do that when another thought came to mind. Life after death!

Not in the spiritual sense – I wasn’t a believer. No, in a very real sense. I had a protective suit, and soon my body would be near absolute zero. Cryonic suspension and reanimation had been going on for a hundred years on earth. The pioneers in that process had no idea they would come back, but they chose suspension instead of the sure death of burial or cremation.

My problem was I didn’t know who or what would find me. I didn’t come with an owner’s manual. Would they know what I breathed? What I needed for nourishment and hydration? The temperature range I needed? Would they regard me as a frozen entrée?

My need to scream was now gone. I knew I would die out here, but just maybe… That maybe was what kept me going. The hope. With hope, there was no despair – yet.

The suit was equipped with a sophisticated recording system designed to document repair processes. If I could just harness that for my needs. I needed a system – some sort of universal language. I knew what oxygen and nitrogen were, but other beings wouldn’t know those elements by their English names. I thought for a long time until the solution came to me. It was both brilliant and terrifying. I could turn off the oxygen flow and leave some in the tank. Provided the tank wasn’t pierced by a micro-meteor, my rescuers could figure out the composition of gases I needed.

Thus came the dilemma – should I leave air in the tanks and cut my own life short in hopes of reanimation after death? Or was that a crazy thought of a soon to be dead man? If I had a gun in a sinking submarine, would I use it, or would I hold out to the end when the water pressure burst the hull? Suppose the sub hit bottom before burst depth? Would I wait on a rescue I knew would never come, or would I spare myself the despair and end the torment quickly with a bullet? The end result would be the same in either case – a dead sailor on the bottom of the sea.

I supposed I should leave a statement in case humans found my remains. I had no wife, no children, no nobody. Space companies had found it much better to hire crew with no attachments. I checked all the right boxes. So, what should I say? Berate the rest of my crew for not noticing I was gone? Berate the company for having ships without multiple redundant communication systems? Complain about the cheap tethers they used? Admonish them for sending only one person out in space to fix equipment? Did I want to waste my remaining breath on that?

I checked the oxygen gauge. About ten minutes left. I would have to make a decision soon. Up until now, it hadn’t been real. I had options. Death was inevitable. What was an additional five minutes of life compared with the possibility of reanimation?

I looked out my visor and for once saw the beautiful vastness of space. I was part of it all – alive or dead. I turned off the oxygen and screamed. Screamed for joy and screamed in terror at the thought of death. I screamed until the beautiful stars faded to black. I hoped that somewhere in the vastness of space, someone or something had heard me.